Thievery Corporation
STOLEN MOMENTS
Thievery Corporation Mastermind a Pan-Global Dance Floor
They're DJs, club owners, and label entrepreneurs, but the Washington, DC-based duo Thievery Corporation are best known for their downtempo grooves, laced with sounds from around the globe. As they did on their last album, the sleeper dance music hit The Mirror Conspiracy, Eric Hamilton and Rob Garza crafted breezy melodies and savvy beats for their latest, The Richest Man in Babylon, and then invited a handful of vocalists to flesh out the mixes. The results reflect the contributors, who range from Icelandic chanteuse Emiliana Torrini to dancehall singer Shinehead and sing in five different languages. In addition to running their club, the 18th Street Lounge, and their label, ESL Music, Hamilton and Garza have released a flurry of extracurricular CDs, including Sounds from the Verve Hi-Fi, a custom-compiled mix disc drawn from the Verve Records vaults, and Abductions & Reconstructions, a collection of their remixes of other artists. The pair also remixed Astrud Gilberto's "Who Needs Forever?" for the generation gap–bridging collection Verve Remixed. In a rare spare moment, Hamilton spoke with Barnes & Noble.com's pop music editor, Lydia Vanderloo, about the his band's surfeit of not-so-covert activities.
Barnes & Noble.com: What do you think is the biggest difference between the new album and The Mirror Conspiracy?
Eric Hamilton: I think it's probably a little bit more complex, a little bit more musical, definitely more lyrical, a little bit more lyrically substantive. I think it's different from Mirror Conspiracy but still has that kind of common Thievery thread. It's a bit more diverse than the past record as well, but then again some of the influences are the same: Indian, Arabic, dub, Brazilian; a new one would be Afro-Cuban. And, of course, this one has a couple ballads on it, like the first track.
B&N.com: Do you write the lyrics, or do the vocalists?
EH: We write some, and the vocalists write some. We also wrote more lyrics for this record than we had in the past. Rob, especially, wrote more lyrics.
B&N.com: Is there a song that you're particularly proud of from a lyrical standpoint?
EH: "Richest Man in Babylon," definitely; "All That We Perceive," too. It's a little more cryptic than "Richest Man," but I really like the lyrics. But I'm also proud of the lyrics that other people wrote, too. You probably haven't seen the translations, but the song in Farsi ["Omid"] and the song in French ["Un Simple Histoire"], the lyrics are very poetic and not predictable.
B&N.com: What are they about?
EH: "Omid," the Persian song, is about maintaining hope in difficult circumstances, and actually the French song has a very similar theme, but it's more about trusting your own instincts. They're both by LouLou.
B&N.com: Are some of them in Portuguese?
EH: One of them is. "Exilo" is in Spanish, and "Meu Destino" is in Portuguese.
B&N.com: So you have a lot of different languages going on.
EH: Yeah, it's pretty cool. We have a lot of friends who come from a lot of places. I don't know what it is about me and Rob, but we really feel not tied to a particular place or confined by a particular set of borders, either physically or mentally. We like to do records that have world implications.
B&N.com: I used to live in DC, and I feel like DC is sort of like that in a way. There are so many people that come from all points in the world and live there for short periods of time.
EH: In a less romantic way, it's kind of like Casablanca in the movie. You get people coming in for a little while, then they leave, then some new people come through. It's weird. Especially in the Lounge, the clientele changes every couple of years. But it's also kind of good because it sort of refreshes itself.
B&N.com: Back to the lyrics. I wanted to ask you about the song "State of the Union," which seems to have a political bent to it.
EH: Oh, definitely. It was written by myself and Rob and Sleepy Wonder, a dancehall vocalist, and Shinehead, a famous dancehall vocalist. It's just a statement about what happens when your own aggression gets thrown back in your face, and the dangers of certain policies that are unfortunately being implemented as we speak.
B&N.com: Tell me about the vocalists on the album. How did you hook up with Emiliana Torrini?
EH: That was a nice, sort of serendipitous thing. She came into the Lounge one night while I was in the studio late -- I was just sort of escaping the crowd and listening to some music. A friend of ours -- an Icelandic guy who runs the airline here, Iceland Air -- brought her in. She had just performed with her band somewhere around DC. They came in and were having a great time, drinking and banging on instruments. Emiliana was actually very quiet, and I was watching her because she didn't seem to be part of the festivities. Then they started to encourage her to sing, but she couldn't sing over this cacophonous drum thing -- people hitting on bongos and playing on basses. So I put on this really mellow track, and she started to sing. Everyone got really quiet, and they started looking at each other. It just sounded beautiful, so I hit Record and recorded a scratch track. She and I talked, and we agreed to get together again. She lived in London, but she came back to DC for a few days. We had a really nice time with her.
B&N.com: How did Sounds from the Verve Hi-Fi come together?
EH: It was pretty cool. We got a call from an A&R guy at Verve, Jason Olaine, who asked us to do a remix for his Verve Remixed project, which, of course, we said yes to. While we had him on the phone, we pitched him on an idea that we'd had for years, which was to do a compilation of our favorite Verve cuts, and he liked the idea. So he ran it up the chain of command at Universal. It took like six months for an approval to come through, but it got approved and we put the record out.
B&N.com: Was it really fun to put together?
EH: It was great. We could probably do like ten of those things -- there's so many great Verve cuts. We had dreams of going to these special Verve vaults and getting to hear all these rare records, but unfortunately, it doesn't exist. They just don't have like one room with all the records in it.
B&N.com: I wanted to ask about some of the remixes you've done, like the ones on Abductions & Reconstructions. How did they come about?
EH: It's always them asking. They want to do a remix usually because they want to broaden the appeal of the artist or they want something for DJs to play, and they ask us to do the mix, and usually we're very happy to do it.
B&N.com: What are some of your favorite mixes that you guys have done?
EH: The David Byrne mix I like a lot. I really like the Hooverphonic mix we did. The Baaba Maal. I love the recent Astrud Gilberto mix we did. It's not on that compilation; it's on the Verve Remixed compilation. I like the Stereolab mix, and we just did a mix yesterday that I like very much. It's of an artist Danielle Simone, it's a French artist. It kind of sounds like Brigitte Bardot-meets-Portishead -- that's what the remix sounds like.
B&N.com: Was there anything you ever tried to do that didn't work out?
EH: Oh, plenty. I think the funniest one was someone asked us to remix Hole, Courtney Love's band. The track was "Malibu," which was sort of pop-y/rock-y, up-tempo track. There was really nothing for us to do other than do like a house mix. But we don't do house mixes, so we thought, oh, this will be funny, we'll do a house mix. And we did one, and I actually thought it turned out to be really good, but they turned it down. She turned it down. I think she hated it, is what the guy said.
B&N.com: Is there anybody that you'd love to remix or produce?
EH: Sure. So many. We've always said we want to do a track with Joe Strummer from the Clash. We'd love to Caetano Veloso from Brazil. Astrud Gilberto -- I'd love to get together and actually do a song with her instead of just a remix. Bebel Gilberto -- we've done a track with her before, but we really want to do another one. [Bebel's Tanto Tempo] was such a huge-selling record. We just performed with her in Spain, and it was kind of like a reunion for us. We had a great time. She's really good live too.
B&N.com: Back to the different strains of sound in your music. What are some of the essential albums in the different genres you draw on -- the must-haves?
EH: On the Verve label, I'd say Jazz Samba Encore! with Stan Getz and Luiz Bonfa -- that's definitely a big one. On the Latin side -- Pucho & His Latin Soul Brothers, but especially Saffron Soul or Tough! -- those are really great records. Or, in a more modern, hip kind of thing, I'd say Poncho Sanchez, anything by Poncho Sanchez, or Cal Tjader, his idol. Indian records -- anything by Ravi Shankar is good, if you want to get in the psychedelic mode. Arabic records -- I would say newer takes on Arabic music would be the new Karminsky Experience record. It's not out now, but it will be out in a few months. And then personal favorites like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On -- that's one of my favorite records. And I know Rob is a big Bob Dylan freak, believe it or not. So he'd be recommending anything by Bob Dylan. That might surprise people.
B&N.com: What about dub?
EH: Oh, I would get anything by Augustus Pablo or King Tubby. Also, I think that Guidance Records puts out really good dub compilations like Hi-Fidelity Dub, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 -- those are really good records for someone who's just trying to get introduced to the music.
B&N.com: I wonder if some of your fans use your music as a jumping-off point to other stuff.
EH: I think they should. That's how I got into older forms of music, back in the new wave era. I realized that all the bands I really liked, like the 2-Tone bands like the Specials, were very derivative of real Jamaican ska. So then it made me interested in checking out the original stuff. And I think that's part of what the Verve CD was for us. It's nice to listen to modern music and electronic music, and there's some good stuff, but I'd hate to think that people will never look back to something that really is brilliant.
October 1, 2002
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